Walking on the tour today I was thinking about how much education the residences of these different neighborhoods have. Many run down streets we were on had residence loitering in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. I thought where and when do they work? Or do they work? A store in an abandoned movie theater had shirts on sale for 2 dollars. Then a man dressed in a casual but more expensive outfit than the 2$ shirts asked about our group and got into preaching about the rally at City Hall for housing rights and revitalization. This post made me think of the connection to the education and the poverty of these areas. Education is a right that people of all statuses should have. Linking property tax to education is a way to link socioeconomic status and money to education. This then makes education a barrier in some cases rather than and enabler to a better class status. If education was linked to state or federal taxes it would make self gentrification of run down an impoverished areas a lot easier because the residents of those neighborhoods could invest with the service sector jobs they attain after college. Education not only in the sense of mandate schools but also general information that should and easily could be more accessible to those who would benefit most from it. Informing residence of existing programs and ways to easily organize and start new programs would benefit the future residence of the area. Then maybe developers would not have to keep reinvesting in new buildings and displacing the former residence just to revitalize the area.
